'The loss of life...the screaming, it was awful': Last surviving First World War widow describes husband's trauma 100 years on from Battle of Passchendaele

Joan Parsons with a photograph of her late husband (Image: Philip Coburn)

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Remembering the fallen

Speaking to Mirror Online at her nursing home in Shalford on the eve of the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Passchendaele, where he courageously served, Joan describes for the very first time the trauma he faced.

Freddie Parsons (Image: Philip Coburn)

Freddie was so pained by what he had seen that he rarely spoke of it. But he confessed the memories he had locked away to the woman who became his confidante.

And most abiding of all were haunting images of the quagmire of Passchendaele – an offensive, thanks to weeks of driving rain, so infamous for the mud which drowned men that it came to encapsulate the very worst of the Western Front.

“As his wife, I became a listener, and I felt that helped him,” Joan says. “I did not ask him, I let him come to me. It did worry him a lot, it was so real to him.

“He told me there were bodies lying in the trenches smothered in mud and they would have to tread on them. The trenches would be full of water and the bodies were floating. The loss of life... He would say the screaming, it was awful.”

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She repeats the words about the floating bodies as we sit in her home.

At 96, her memory is gently fading from colour to sepia but she comes back to that image again and again. It is unsurprising. The killing fields of Passchendaele, the Third Battle of Ypres, in northern Belgium – dubbed the “Battle of Mud” – were horrific.

Joan was not married to Freddie when he fought as a 20-year-old gunner with the Royal Garrison Artillery. Twenty-five years his junior, she met him long after his return and they married in 1944.

Joan Parsons who married her husband after he had survived serving in the Royal Artillery in World War I fighting in the battle of Passchendaele (Image: Philip Coburn)

Freddie had never married until then, living with his ageing mother. “He was a lonely man,” Joan recalls.

You cannot help but wonder if his trauma did not allow him to find happiness. Perhaps Joan was the first woman he felt he could share it with? The soldier, originally from Portsmouth, “was a gentle, sensitive man,” Joan says. Yet, like so many of his generation, he was brave as a lion.

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He served from January 1916 until the end of the war in November 1918, taking part in the Somme as well as Passchendaele, which raged from July 31 to November 6, 1917.

Freddie was a gunner with the Royal Garrison Artillery. He always said he fired some of the first shells at the Third Battle of Ypres, in which about 325,000 Allied troops and 260,000 Germans died.

Trenches sloshed with feet of water, shell holes became lakes of mud and wounded men were reported as shedding their uniforms as the weight of the slime made it impossible to move.

Described as a “quicksand”, a “monster” which sucked men down, the mud suffocated soldiers who fell from duckboards. It is said more men died from drowning here than in any other land battle.

Joan describes the rats, too. At Passchendaele, they were not only drawn to human bodies but the countless dead horses. Used in teams of eight to hoist the huge howitzers Freddie fired, even these mighty beasts could not plough through the swamp. Dying where they fell, they could not be moved.

“He could not bear rats, the battlefields were just alive with them,” says Joan. “They were eating the body parts.” But Freddie adored horses. He told Joan of one time he stayed up all night with a terrified animal as life ebbed slowly from it. “This horse had been fatally wounded and he was not allowed to shoot it, because every bullet had to be fired against the enemy,” says Joan.

“He stayed with it until it died. It took a long time, that upset him.”

(Image: Philip Coburn)

The only anecdote which raised a smile was the time he challenged a group of British soldiers on sentry duty. “He said ‘Speak up, who are you?’,” smiles Joan. “The men told him he should not be asking, then another said, ‘Oh yes he should challenge me, he is doing his duty’. That man turned out to be General Haig! I think he was proud of that.”

Passchendaele was the brainchild of Sir Douglas Haig, who has gone down in history as wasting thousands of lives. His aim was to reach the Belgian coast so German submarines could be destroyed, as it was felt the destruction of British ships could not be sustained much longer.

Freddie knew he was lucky to survive and never seemed proud of his achievements. He attempted to put the war behind him, except for his confidences to Joan.

He worked on the railways and eventually found happiness in marriage and their three children and two grandchildren.

“He loved children,” smiles Joan. “I think the way he coped with what he had been through was to be so grateful he was alive.” He was awarded three medals but he never wore them. Joan adds: “In the end, he threw them away.”

Freddie died in 1981, aged 86. He was a content man, says Joan, who had finally found a loving antidote to his pain.

“I miss him, I will never forget,” she smiles.

And while Joan will never forget the man she loved, we will never forget the sacrifices he and his comrades made for all of us.

Joan came forward through the Department of Culture, Media and Sport’s descendant ballot for the Passchendaele commemorations in Belgium on Sunday (July 30) and Monday (July 31). Her daughter Gill, granddaughter and two great-grandchildren will go